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Life

Reality programs were all the rage back when TV was in its infancy. Just ask JoAnne Rushton and Debra Cotich. In 1957 their mother, Evelyn Stuart, starred in one the biggest hits of all time - Queen for a Day. Also on the show: a waiter talks about serving people, at their best and their worst.

Reality TV may seem like a recent phenomenon. But programs featuring real people were all the rage back when television was in its infancy. Just ask JoAnne Rushton and Debra Cotich. In 1957 their mother, Evelyn Stuart, starred in one the biggest hits of all time - Queen for a Day. Also in this show: Listener Follow-up: May I Take Your Order?

Theresa Phillips' vision of the American Dream for her children is that they are safe, regardless of the path they take in life. Her work within a trailer park women's co-op in Battle Creek, Mich., shaped that vision. Theresa says she moved to the community to escape an abusive past. To her surprise, she found many women in the same boat. So Theresa invited all the women in the trailer park to her lot to figure out how they could change their lives.

Arts & Culture

Joanne Spencer was a budding dancer when she first heard the music of Michael Jackson. She became obsessed with watching his videos and concerts on TV and soon became a master Michael Jackson mimic. Her exposure to his new dance moves prompted her to take her dancing to the next level.

Life

Lynn Gazley has been living that debate. Lynn wasn't having any luck getting pregnant, so she turned to fertility treatments. Then she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer and had to start chemotherapy immediately. Lynn later learned that she carries a gene mutation that made her highly susceptible to developing breast cancer. And it turns out that the fertility treatments may have caused the rapid growth of the cancer.

Life

We’ve had a number of stories of “encounters” with well-known characters. The encounter Elise Guyette wrote in to tell us about happened in South Africa. Elise was traveling with her husband and their 6-year-old daughter, Kathleen. The went to an event where a statue was being dedicated to Mahatma Gandhi. Bishop Desmond Tutu was there. So was Mandela. To everyone's surprise, Elise's daughter Kathleen joined the two great men on the stage.

Life

Leonor Childers is one of the few people in this country who have a new kind of heart pump - one that is permanently implanted that she plugs into the wall each night. When Leonor was pregnant with her second set of twins, she discovered a lump on her breast. It was cancer. She and her husband decided to go through with the pregnancy, despite chemo and other treatments. When she delivered 8 weeks early, the last thing the couple expected was for Leonor to suffer heart trouble. But that's what happened.

Life

Crystal Riportella-Crose was adopted when she was an infant and grew up in Vermont. As an interracial child in a Caucasian family, she always wondered what her birth mother looked like. So when she got older, she began to search for her, and eventually found her birth mother on the social networking site, MySpace.

Business

New York City is a hard place to make ends meet, especially if you’re young, broke and unemployed. Leila Day had her dream job at Lincoln Center organizing concerts and fancy cocktail parties, hobnobbing with celebrities. But she eventually found herself out of work, sending out hundreds of resumes and getting no return phone calls.

Life

Kelly Fern was born in South Korea, the fourth of six children. Her parents gave her up for adoption when she was 5, with the hope that she would be fed and educated. Kelly grew up in Rochester, Minn., distant from her Korean roots and with a mental picture of her Korean family that turned out not to match reality. Last year she received a letter that changed her perception of her family and herself. She flew to Korea for the first time to be reunited with her family after 37 years. Also in this story: listener Bill Munro's true story, "The Match."